


lock & key

by pyrites



Series: hand in hand [6]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (Not Jon! Wink.), Aromantic Character, Autistic Jon, Bisexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Flashbacks, Gen, Indian Jon, Jewish Jon, Jon Sims Bi Pride January 2021, Nonbinary Jon, Pre-Canon, TL;DR - Jon finds his grandmother's diary.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:36:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29828505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrites/pseuds/pyrites
Summary: (For all that he knew dadima kept her feelings a secret, Jon is not ignorant to the fact that had she tried even the slightest bit harder and even a moment too soon, he would have pushed her away. He can’t remember if he ever asked her to change. He may have only ever thought it in his head as he willed himself to change, too, and then never did.)vi.acceptance
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist's Grandmother
Series: hand in hand [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095512
Comments: 31
Kudos: 49
Collections: GerryTitan verse, bi jon sims celebration





	lock & key

**Author's Note:**

> yes, i know it's march. yes, i'm still tagging it as the [jon sims bi pride event](http://jonsimsbipride.tumblr.com/). no, i'm not taking questions. 🧡

───── ✿ ─────

Jon could never bring himself to light the candles. They would just shrink and shrink and cease to be, and then what would he have left of the gesture? The time spent, the trembling effort, the memory? Maybe he’s never been good at letting things go after all. Perhaps where his capacity to trust truly failed was in trusting his own memories to remain unchanged, untainted.

Everything feels tainted lately. Jon wonders now whether or not that was true _before_ Prentiss, _before_ Gertrude, or if his memory of a clean existence prior to this filthy, fearful one was even real to start with. He’s never liked to risk being wrong, but— well, no one _wants_ their greatest fears to materialize around them.

He sets each of the three candles down on the mattress with everything else and pinches their wicks to straighten them out. Seeing them sitting upright makes him want to see them on a windowsill again, or his bedside table where they would be in view if he were tossing and turning. He brushes the thought away. All of these things need to go back in the shoebox when he’s finished with this little ritual, there’s simply no use for them anywhere else and he might lose or damage them otherwise. Jon picks out the two cards from the box to reread them. 

It was his own cowardice that kept him from ever Skype calling with Basil, his own unwillingness to break the illusion he’d created and unwittingly gender himself regardless of common ground. He can’t manufacture a voice for xir in his head when he reads the Ladino proverb and its translation. The one that reads out _Dear Dimmy_ on the note is at least warm and beautifully ambiguous and it makes Jon stop in his tracks for a moment and wonder if the voice is meant to belong to _xir_ or to himself.

G-d, he hasn’t thought of himself as _Dimmy_ in years. He’d only tried to go by it once in person, when he was living with Amir and Veronica. Amir being trans made it easier to ask him to switch names and pronouns, and so Jon thought it would be as good a chance as any to test it out. There were times when he would hear it called across the flat and it would take a moment for him to remember, _oh, that’s me._ And when it clicked, his first instinct was usually to laugh, to distract himself from the faintly hysterical feeling in his stomach and lungs before he could take the time to discern whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Maybe it was the weird rhyme with his surname, which didn’t even exist when _Basil_ called him Dimmy and so wasn’t constantly in his periphery. Hearing it spoken aloud, of course, just made Jon think of his saba’s old nickname when he and dadima first met, because “Simmy” had apparently been better suited for such a rowdy, upbeat young man than “Stuart” ever was. Dadima used to say that she couldn’t rightly continue to call him that once her married name was “Miriam Sims,” but Jon knows better than to think she never thought it in her head. It might have slipped into her stories if she told them more often than every once in a blue moon.

Dadima was a very private person. She didn’t talk much about her marriage or let herself get swept up in nostalgia or linger too long on the past. She would talk to Jon about _his_ parents, but never her own. By now, he knows she never just _told_ him things not because it just wasn’t there, or that she didn’t have much to tell. It was because _so much_ had happened to her that she couldn’t find ways to put it into words. It was too big for her to gather up in her mouth and arrange into carefully spoken lines or linear stories, and something about that must have frightened her into making herself smaller. So small that he couldn’t grab a hold of her and understand until it was far, far too late.

There’s only one item left in the shoebox, lying flat on its back and pressed into a corner.

───── ✿ ─────

Dadima never, ever went through his things unless they were cleaning his room together. He’d never had to clean hers by himself before. Not even the study, the space they shared in total isolation from one another, on a much smaller scale than if Jon were to take the whole house into account. The whole, sprawling house, just right for her and her husband and their son and his wife and _their_ baby and however many could have followed after him had they lived long enough to want more. Just right for all of those people. Too big for only two.

Too big to stay in alone.

Even just one more person might have made it more bearable when it was only the pair of them, but Jon could never choose who he wanted back the most. It would have probably been the most fair to wish it were his father, so that dadima could have back the son she actually wanted, but he almost missed his bebe more because he could remember her. Just barely, he kept remembering her.

It was sitting at the computer chair that he wondered — if dadima could only have two people out of the three she’d lost, would she trade him for someone else?

Stupid hypotheticals. None of it mattered. Everyone was dead now.

Everyone was dead, and it was up to Jon to clean out the last bits of memory from this house so someone else could buy it. Occupy it, change it, until he was really gone from it, too. And really, he’d been gone before dadima was — he left. He chose that. There was no reason to feel so cheated and erased and forgotten.

He found the journal in the third drawer down, lowest to the floor. Bending to retrieve it every time she meant to write a new entry must have ached. How much pain was she willing to put herself in for the sake of keeping it hidden?

There was no reason not to read it. How else would have ever known who she really was when he wasn’t looking? How different her inner voice might have sounded from the one he knew? How else would he see what she really thought of him, all this time? Did she talk about him? Would it be colder in its uncensored openness, or would this be where he found all of the words that fell through the cracks in the stone pillar she spent his whole life trying to be? 

Someone had to determine what was and wasn’t worth keeping. There was no one to help him. There was no one to stop him.

He read through the entire thing in one sitting.

09.18.2010.

  
I learned a new word today: Aromanticism. 

  
I love writing it. I love saying it aloud — it feels pleasant in my mouth. It feels right under my pen.

  
I was doing this for Jon, and I’m still not finished. It always felt wrong to just assume or declare that I know something about him if he hasn’t seen fit to bring it up to me on his own, but I wanted to be prepared for anything that he might inch across the table to me someday should he change his mind. I don’t know if this whole mess with his knee has made him more open or more afraid, but I met some of his friends from the theatre in the hospital and figured that it was time to broaden my understanding of the people he feels so at home with. I didn’t expect to find in my research (at least a part of) the reason I never remarried.

  
It’s nothing I haven’t said to myself before, but perhaps I could say it differently: Simmy was my dearest friend. Of course that wasn’t all, but perhaps it also was. I don’t think he ever begrudged me for it, either. I think he was my best friend because he understood exactly what I could and couldn’t give to him, and never expected more. After that, I must have believed I would never find that understanding again. More than that, I just didn’t want to. I was so busy.

  
Raises many questions. None I need to answer right now. Perhaps this is my window to bring it up. Put myself under the microscope first? I want to trust in his judgment. He must know far more than I, and I have very little trust in the computer. It was hard enough to find this web page with help.

_(Jon never stopped wishing that he’d introduced her to Georgie. It was always his anxiety about having a_ girlfriend _that made him stall, avoid it, miss his chance. He didn’t want to risk seeing some kind of relief on dadima’s face that it wasn’t a boy, or blank confusion because she’d worked so hard to get used to the idea that there might be one someday._

_He’d known from a young age that she had assumed that he was gay, around the time he mistook himself for such, as well. He didn’t need to bring home boyfriends or whine about schoolyard crushes for her to know that he was often bullied and put together why — it wasn’t_ all _his autism, his disability, his race, his faith. There were other pieces to it._

_Neither of them ever brought it up. He thought sometimes that it was because she was choosing not to see it, but when she took the words out of his mouth and said it was purely because it was just as fundamental a piece as all the others, he nearly wept for all their sameness. She’d been operating under that observation for most of his life and only ever tried to respect his privacy; to a fault, they realized later, but not to hurt him.)_

02.27.2011

  
I thought once that it was worse to not know where he’d run off to. To have no idea where he was, whether he’d been taken or tripped into traffic or found a crack between dimensions to slip through like some book of his had become real and chosen him as its protagonist. It turns out I just hate it when he’s gone.

  
I think he’s afraid to occupy space. I taught him so much shame, and it’s too late to unteach it. 

  
His new flatmate might not tell him that we met in the hospital waiting room. I think it would be selfish to wish that he would. What sort of coward relies on the good word of a stranger to make her grandson understand? I would have lent him a dress from my own closet had he come to me needing one. I have so many in black and white.

  
If I were better, he would never need to wonder on my belief in him. I thought I would get to tell him while he was here, but he only wanted to be alone. How could I barge in and sit down and say, “Jon, I know you’ve been keeping secrets from me and I want you to know that there’s no need.” He would feel so exposed. I would shatter his last remaining trust in me and he would never come home again.

  
He promised he’ll be back for Pesach. I’ll say something then. Perhaps he’ll feel more up to talking after being out from under this roof again.

  
I’ve just never seen him hurting so badly.

  
Or haven’t I? He used to be so good at hiding it. How could I teach him that?

  
I say this as though I’ve never asked myself that question before. And maybe every time I’ve asked it, yes, the circumstances have been different. When every thread traces back to the same root, one has to wonder. Though, I suppose there is no more wondering left to do, if what I want is for him to truly know.

  
I want to retrace the last few months. The last few years. His lifetime, mine. If he’d never taken that fall, perhaps we wouldn’t have been set so far back. Every child I’ve ever loved has been taken by a fall. I will not lose him as well.

_(For all that he knew dadima kept her feelings a secret, Jon is not ignorant to the fact that had she tried even the slightest bit harder and even a moment too soon, he would have pushed her away. He can’t remember if he ever asked her to change. He may have only ever thought it in his head as he willed himself to change, too, and then never did._

_He remembers her quoting this entry almost word for word that Pesach. Like a script, memorized before a make-or-break performance, and he never knew until he found the book. They talked for hours almost every day of that week straight, so much that it really felt like making up for all the years’ worth of eggshells and caution. They laughed about the dresses in her closet; beautiful, yes, but not for him. He’d needed to find his own, and_ honestly, dadima, I could never wear my _grandmother’s dress_ onstage.

_She told him she knew that, but she wanted to tell him anyway that what was hers could be his, too, if he wanted it. She struggled to think of a better way to convey the true depth of her support, the full extent of her arms’ reach. Not only her willingness to be involved in his life, but her ongoing wish to. It was about the request. It was about the acceptance of an invitation.)_

03.06.2012

  
Jon,

  
I hope you don’t feel apprehended by this final entry being a letter, but I know that you may be the only one to ever read this. Maybe once, I might have thought you would lock it away out of spite, but I have never feared that you would throw it out. That’s never been who you are. You are more than welcome to my thoughts. I don’t know if you’ve been reading chronologically or if you flipped here first to check when I’d last written, but in the event of the latter, I hope you’ll read the rest someday.

  
This is not a letter I’m confident in writing. Ordinarily, I would have written about three drafts of this before I copied it into the book so that it was perfect, but I felt that would be disingenuous. I want this to just be me talking to you, the way I’ve been talking to myself all these years.

  
This habit of documenting my days may be thanks to Bubbe Ruth and her refusal to let me forget my prayers as a girl. Our memories, the path we walked, the choices we make… Someday, they may be all someone has. They should be preserved, kept safe. We rely so much on word of mouth, but that skill doesn’t always come naturally. I’m lucky to have been able to learn from my sister, from our friends at temple, but you know as well as I that I have felt stitched by the hands to their coattails because I think that you’ve felt stitched to mine.

  
You already know that I’d meant to protect you. I wanted you where I could see you, home safe and out of danger. I wanted to be a mountain for you, not some wet-eyed old crone with half a heart left from losing. You already know that I don’t blame you for those losses, and that I never meant to make you carry them — I know that you’d say you know. I’m telling you again in writing, so that you don’t forget. And so that you can look back at this and see how truly sorry I am.

  
You’ve forgiven me, too, and I won’t reject that. I’ll only remind you that it’s alright to resent me sometimes, when you remember the days we spent so quiet. I know that you’ve had about enough missing people as I have, so I won’t say I hope you’ll only remember me fondly. I only hope that when you think of me, you remember me honestly; as I make myself now, and as you knew me yourself. The last thing I want to leave you with is regret.

  
I didn’t get a last conversation with either of your parents. They both left us so suddenly and every day, I wonder what we might have said to one another had we been given the chance. I don’t want to leave you with so many unanswered questions, but I’m afraid that even after we’ve tried so hard to make up for lost time, I still don’t know what you need me to say. I don’t know what things you didn’t hear enough from me, or what things you want to know about my life, or what peace I could possibly bring you.

  
I may not have started writing these entries with the hope that one day you’d look through them and finally understand me, but somewhere along the way, that may have become the intention. There is a box full to the brim with these in the study closet. They’re already arranged in chronological order, but I’ll warn you that some of the entries contain sporadic memories. You’ll find your abba there, and your bebe. You’ll find yourself in them everywhere, even from the times we’ve spent apart.

  
You mean the world to me and more, Jon. You always have. And one day, you will shine doing any number of the beautiful things I know you’ve been nurturing while you thought I wasn’t looking.

  
I am so proud of you. 

  
Those words feel too small for what I intend by them, but I think they are some of the most important I could leave you with. I know it’s not enough, and never will be. But I need you to know that you are enough. You have always been enough.

_(No, he hadn’t. No, he isn’t. No, he won’t be. Not when he feels so outnumbered that he can’t invite anyone onto his side. Not when the death of yet another old woman has thrown his own reality into his face and forced him to reconcile with how little he’d known about her, and what he was meant to be after she was gone._

_But dadima wasn’t shot in the chest and left to rot, the skeleton guarding the treasure chest before it was stolen by scavengers. She drowned in her sleep from pneumonia, and she had left him everything. She left him as many maps and charts and keys as she could, and he is still finding bits of gold in the shipwreck to this day._

_Sometimes he views the world through portholes, even now. Dadima didn’t mean for him to so deeply fear them breaking that he spent more time searching for hairline fractures in the glass than studying the bird on the watertop right in front of him. She meant for him to learn from her mistakes; a ship manned by one sailor will sink.)_

───── ✿ ─────

**Author's Note:**

> and here we go! a bit more insight into miriam's thought process. we love an [autistic](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/616127436034375680/), aromantic, very traumatized, [vast-touched](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/617608308665335808/) legend who tried her best.
> 
> if you're not familiar with her perspective on their relationship, she has two POV chapters in [two ships passing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22189123/chapters/52974727)!
> 
> only one more installment left! one final piece, and then we're home free. 
> 
> [[jon sims bi pride tumblr](http://jonsimsbipride.tumblr.com/)] | [[my tumblr](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)] | [[ GTCU masterpost](https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/14KlgPfOb16ocGj8k0QrElw6UY0SqoNeH2yTj_zQ31bA/edit#)]


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